Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

248 Language Diversity in the Classroomaway from enlarged identities per se. It is both the obligation and thefulfillment of intellectual life, after all, to express what those who are lessarticulate also feel. There is, of course, a great deal of circumstantialevidence supporting the contention that it is the identity components, thesymbols of the tribe, that energize languages beyond their instrumentalexistences: obvious examples are the relationships between language andethnicity, and language and nationalism.At these most potent levels of ‘groupness’, there are clear distinctionsbetween monolingual majority-group speakers in their own ‘mainstream’settings, and minority-group members who are very oftenbilingual by necessity (to take two extreme cases). For the former, theinstrumentality of language coincides with its symbolic force, itsidentity-bearing capacity: the language of shopping is also the languageof culture and tradition. For most people in this situation, the languageidentitylinkage is not problematic; indeed, it is seldom considered atall. Minority-group speakers, however, rarely have the luxury ofinattention. For them, aspects of language and culture are often moreimmediate, and the crux of the matter is often a split between thelanguage or languages that circumstances force them to use, and theirmaternal, traditional or cultural variety. The upshot, then, is thatbilingualism and multilingualism can throw matters of identity intosharper relief, because of perceived threats to one (or more) languages.The result is that beyond the linguistic technicalities, beyond variationsin patterns of acquisition and development the most compelling issuessurrounding bilingualism are social and psychological. Beyond utilitarianand unemotional instrumentality, the heart of bilingualism has to dowith identity and belonging.Notes1. It is not inappropriate to add a fifth item to this list: signing. While manyrecent treatments of language and communication take the deaf communityinto account, its status as a minority group is still often ignored. There nowexists, however, a significant ‘deaf culture’ described as a ‘healthysociological community’ by the Canadian Association of the Deaf, andits sister organizations around the world one that rejects the earlier andstill socially prevalent ‘medicalization of deafness’. Members of this culturereject such labels as ‘deficient’ or ‘disabled’ and, following this logic, somealso reject medical interventions aimed at reducing or eliminating deafness:attitudes towards cochlear implants are particularly polarized here.2. A notorious example here draws upon the distinction between the experiencesof anglophone Canadian pupils in all-French classrooms, and those ofSpanish-speaking youngsters in English-medium classrooms in the UnitedStates. See further details in my discussion of ‘immersion’ and ‘submersion’.